American Horror Story: Hotel, Episode 1 - A Graphic Welcome from an Ageing Series
There are long-accepted flaws to the ongoing anthology horror series, and they are not only noticeable in the pilot to the fifth season, Hotel, but they're taken advantage of. Hotel brings Lady Gaga as the creepy Countess, but sacrifices a lot for glamour, style, and shock value.
The first 45 minutes of the hour-long pilot is made up of a series of scenes essentially trying to one-up the previous one. Each one is gorier than the last, each one a little creepier, and they're delivered with the confidence that a show 5 seasons in should be exhibiting.
The through-line is Detective John Lowe, played by Wes Bentley (The Hunger Games, Interstellar), who offers what little humane connection we can take from the episode. His scenes increase as the episode wears on, but in the early part they're too few. Despite that, he and his family have a simmering connection to the hotel, and a mystery is established that is a pleasant surprise amidst the surface-level gore.
Lady Gaga demands discussion, having been the most heavily promoted factor in the lead-up to the premiere. Here, she is introduced through a lengthy scene backed by a tense but catchy musical cue, and it's in this scene that Hotel shows the skills its learned from past seasons. We know something is going to happen, and the wait is excruciating.
So too is it this way in a later scene, a gorgeously filmed set piece taking us through a building filled with glass panes. We see the moonlight shining through, creating a surreal effect, but on the edges of our seats we wait for the climax as the detective's daughter wanders through the creepy surrounds.
The suspense is quite spot on. A more subtle scene has the two girls whom we meet at the beginning (meeting cliche expectations with a heavy fist) rip open a mattress from which a ghastly smell is protruding. But while suspense is key to good horror, the pay-off to each of these scenes is never as affecting as they perhaps could be.
It's hard to say whether this comes down to the horror curse, by which to mean we've probably seen everything there is to see. It's often considered that modern horror is less about smartly frightening cinema and more about throwing new, disgusting imagery at the audience that exceeds the last one. It might simply come down to the fact that the episode prioritises shock value over substance. Even Lady Gaga's climax to her lengthy introduction falls short. The scenes at some point offer no more than a numbing sensation. We switch off to it eventually.
The pacing is haphazard, a standard which was set with its assortment of horror scenes. These scenes almost made the explicit effort to introduce new characters every time, to a jarring degree. From then on, the horror continues, but is interspersed with flashbacks, domestic and necessary scenes with our sole relatable protagonist, and minor scenes that actually involve more than a few lines of dialogue. It's jumpy, and while at times it's hard to keep up, it can also very quickly become hard to bother with.
By the end of the episode, there are a few (fragile) emotional strands built. Detective Lowe has a trauma that is cleverly alluded to in the background right up until the flashback, and that trauma is brought right into present events near the end (albeit without his own presence). Kathy Bates as Iris, the hotel's manager, is creepy and distant, but she too receives a little backstory and some minor sympathy despite hindsight suggesting she deserves none.
And that can be said for everyone. None of the characters, barring Lowe, deserve sympathy, and really none of them are all that interesting. A fascinating diversion takes place in which a potential buyer of the hotel is given a tour, and this suggests that all the creeps and ghouls in the hotel might be at risk (though that seems hard to believe).
Hotel begins with a mystery that you might miss amongst the battle between the variety of scenes, all attempting to out-do the other. It's stylishly shot, with a superbly creepy opening, but those are on par with the standard the show has set. The pilot suggests little is going to change in the formula for the horror series, and it's all too likely that, by the end of this season, we might all feel that the show has very quickly started to show its age.
